Modern Drama

134 REVIEWS GRAHAM SAUNDERS. 'Love Me or Kill Me:' Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes. Manchesler: Manchester UP, 2002. Pp. xi + 207, illustrated. £14.99 (Pb). Reviewed by Laurens De Vas, Ghent University Though Sarah Kane was criticized for the explicit violence that her plays brought to the stage and that was considered by many critics to be gratuitous, her status as a leading contemporary playwright was confirmed when Methuen published her Complete Plays in 2001. Her work is now the subject of academic research, and Graham Saunders's 'Love Me or Kill Me': Sarah Kane alld the Theatre ofExtremes is the first book-length study devoted to an oeuvre that consists of only five plays but that could hardly be more diverse in style and language. The sometimes scathing reactions that Kane's plays provoked ·were the result not only of her depiction of atrocities but of her dismissal of the realistic conventions to which the English playwriting tradition had long be. en faithful. Hence, her work was initially more widely appreciated on the continent, where realism on stage has not had as firm a foothold as it has had in Britain. But while Kane's resistance to well-defined plot and narrative won her fame as a young playwright who radically rejected the well-made play structure, her work did not come out of the blue, uninfluenced by preceding generations. Indeed, Howard Barker, with his concept of a Theatre of Catastrophe, was a notable influence, as were Edward Bond and Samuel Beckett, whose musical flow of words is recalled in the rhythm that is so evident in Kane's later plays. Other influences on Kane include Shakespeare, Barthes, and Kafka, and while in most cases Kane herself has provided the references to the works that have left their mark on her plays, Saunders examines some other notable intertextual elements, such as the relationship between Blasted and Pinter's The Dumb Waiter. Saunders's book consists of two main parts, the first of which amounts to a monograph on Kane's five plays. Since Saunders focuses on the dramatic work, he does not deal with Skin, the ten-minute screenplay that is included in Kane's Complete Plays. Approaching the work thematically, Saunders relies extensively on interviews that he and others conducted with Kane, so that extracts from conversations and letters support thorough analyses of the plays. This methodology, together with a comparison of two earlier drafts of Blasted, results in a well-founded interpretation in which several motifs are traced from Kane's first play, Blasted, through to her last, 4.48 Psychosis. Parallels are drawn between characters in different plays, laying bare recurring power relationships and hierarchies, for example, between A and C in Crave and Ian and Cate in Blasted. As well, a number of Kane's plays seem to depict a vulgar debasement of women by male protagonists, who, in the end, appear to be the Reviews 135 only characters who actually achieve redemption. Another feature of Kane's development that Saunders clarifies is her movement away from languagebased work to a more minimalist yet intense use of words and an increasing emphasis on theatrical imagery and metaphor. The text of Cleansed thus includes more stage directions than speech, and the play is Kane's most Artaudian work in its concatenation of several physically exhausting "tableaux." The second part of Saunders's book is devoted to interviews that he conducted with eight people closely connected to Kane and her work, among them directors James Macdonald and Vicky Featherstone and actor Daniel Evans. They all speak of their experiences of working with Kane and how they dealt with staging her work, while translator Nils Taben describes how Kane's work was received in Gennany and the stumbling blocks associated with adapting her plays to the continental stage. Thanks to a balanced compilation of directors, actors, translators, and artistic directors, Saunders avoids the trap of repetition. Answers never overlap too much, though it would sometimes have been interesting to have more extensive responses, as, for example. when Kane's agent Mel Kenyon remembers discussing with Kane issues relating to 4.48 Psychosis. Instead of functioning as...